The underlying theme of this article is the new American “Judeo-Christian” religion. “Judeo-Christian” used to be a respectable scholarly term for a tradition that includes both the Old and New Testament.

However, in the United States during the last three decades, Judeo-Christian has also become a powerful code word. Among Zionist neo-conservatives and Christian Zionists — especially politicians — it refers to a political and religious alliance among strange bedfellows.

“Judeo-Christian values” now justify the creation of an “Eretz (Greater) Israel” and the expulsion of millions of Muslim and Christian Palestinians from their ancestral homeland. The almost unanimous Congressional vote last month to support unconditionally Israel’s brutal aggression against Lebanon shows the power of “Judeo-Christian values” in America today.

“Christian Zionism is a modern theological and political movement that embraces the most extreme ideological positions of Zionism, thereby becoming detrimental to a just peace within Palestine and Israel. The Christian Zionist programme provides a worldview where the Gospel is identified with the ideology of empire, colonialism and militarism. In its extreme form, it laces an emphasis on apocalyptic events leading to the end of history rather than living Christ's love and justice today.”

Many conservative and liberal commentators have written about the dangers of the symbiotic relationship among Israel’s militarists, some Christian evangelicals and Bush’s big business administration. In six years this coalition has ripped apart the Middle East with brutal wars of attrition in Palestine Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and, possibly, Iran. These conflicts are costing the United States international respect and more than ten million dollars an hour.

The United States currently borrows from Japanese and Chinese bankers $2.2 billion dollars a day just to pay the interest on the deepening trade and budget deficits. Massive military spending and the wholesale transfer of wealth to America's very rich now comprise 2/3rds of the world’s savings. Clearly the imminent world economic collapse will dwarf the “depression” of the 1930’s.

Americans are waking up to the fact that the “War on Terrorism” is a manufactured scare campaign that seemingly pits “peaceful” Christianity and Judaism against “Islamic Fascism,” but that really serves a number of hidden agendas—all opposed to our interests and those of the rest of humanity.

Many complain about the Israel Lobby, Christian Right and Halliburton. In this series we will show how the lash-up between wealthy Zionist political contributors and Christian millionaire televangelists has also perverted America‘s traditionally shared religious values.

During the Bush and Cheney adminstration the civilized universal values of New Testament Christianity, enlightened modern Judaism, and tolerant Islam have degenerated into a racist, bloodthirsty, vengeance-seeking Old Testament tribalism.

This major religious and political shift in the United States took place in my lifetime. It began with the the foundation of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948, and matured after Israel’s 1967 War and the publication of Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth. It was nurtured by Israel’s bloody ethnic cleansing of its neighborhood.

The very phrase “Judeo-Christian” is intentionally discriminatory among three monotheistic religions with the same roots: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The odd omission of Islam (a religion of a billion people) is exclusively American, profoundly political and historically unfair.

Judaism rejects the divinity — even the existence — of Jesus Christ. Christian anti-Semitism produced the Inquisition and contributed to the Holocaust. Islam, however, reveres both the Hebrew prophets and Jesus.

As conservative columnist Charley Reese writes: “The God Muslims worship is the same God Christians and Jews worship. The oldest Christian communities in the world are all in Muslim countries. There have always been Christian and Jewish communities in the Muslim world. Muslims are commanded to treat Christians and Jews as they would treat themselves. They revere Jesus as a prophet and highly respect the Virgin Mary. The disputes you see in the modern Middle East are not religious; they are all about secular matters, principally Israeli occupation of Arab lands.”

In his recent speech to the United Nations, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad praised both Moses and Jesus as prophets. Twenty-five thousand Jews live peacefully in Iran today and practice their religion with government encouragement. Despite their small numbers, there is a Jewish seat in the Iranian parliament.

The article below serves it contrasts the way that the American and Israeli media frame the Middle East conflict with the framework of Arab and Muslim people and much of the rest of the world. It explains how a (bare) majority of Americans were just persuaded to see Israel as the victim, Lebanon as the aggressor, and Hizbullah as crazy terrorists using civilians as “human shields.”

This article will help you understand why so many Americans, including those in the “peace movement” did not raise their voices for a full 34 days while the Bush Administration single-handedly blocked the world’s demand for a ceasefire as tiny democratic Lebanon was pulverized by the world’s fourth largest military machine largely financed by our taxpayer dollars.

As an addition we have posted an introduction to Christian Zionism in the form of ten questions and answers. Readers will find scholarly references for further study.

What Is Christian Zionism?

Ten Questions and Answers

By Irving Wesley Hall

1. When you speak of Christian Zionists, can you give us some American examples?

That’s easy because the Christian Zionist movement is almost 100% “Made in the USA.” It was a fringe movement inside American Christianity until the 1970’s. Nowadays it is hard to name one prominent televangelist who isn’t a Christian Zionist.
Many leading Republican politicians pursue its agenda as well. The Reverend s Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell are Christian Zionists—or dispensationalists—as their theology is called. But we can get into that later.
Prominent Christian Zionist politicians include Republicans Tom DeLay, Ralph Reed, and President George W. Bush.

2. You mean all of those men agree on religion?

They may have differences. All Christians do. But they agree on at least three theological points with powerful political implications:
1. unconditional support for Israel’s hawks,
2. the imminence of the final war of Armageddon, and
3. the belief that born-again Christians will go to Heaven without dying in what is called the Rapture.

Second, Christian Zionists agree on the inevitability of Armageddon, most likely through a worldwide nuclear war that will kill the majority of us living on earth. Most Christian Zionists expect Armageddon in their lifetimes after most Jews have “returned” to Israel. The ingathering of the Jews in the Holy Land is the critical event in an elaborate “End Times” scenario that dispensationalists piece together from verses lifted from several books in the Bible. We can get into that later.

Third, these folks expect to escape the horrors that they believe are predicted in the Bible. Based on several misinterpreted Bible passages they believe their born-again elite will be whisked away to Heaven in an event they call the Rapture. We can discuss the passages if we have time.

3. How many Americans agree with this Biblical interpretation?

Tens of millions of Christian evangelicals accept some of the tenets of dispensationalism, although they may not accept all or even know the word.

Nuclear Armageddon gained currency after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The horrible idea that God plans to destroy the world in this way was first popularized by Hal Lindsey in his best seller, Late Great Planet Earth, thirty-five years ago.

Anglican minister and Bible scholar Stephen Sizer points out that the publication of Lindsey’s book in the early ’70s and the subsequent business success of fire-and-brimstone TV preachers launched modern Christian Zionism.

The televangelists’ audience has been estimated to be larger than the circulation of Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times combined.

One survey found 60-70 million or 20-25% of Americans believe in the Rapture. Unqualified support for Israel among Americans is highest among Jews and Christian Evangelicals. One poll found 39% of Americans believe that when the Bible describes the earth being destroyed by fire it means the inevitability of a worldwide nuclear war.

4. What is the connection between organized Christian Zionism and Zionism?

When Ariel Sharon’s army invaded the Palestinian territories in 2002, President George W. Bush publicly demanded that Israel withdraw. Bush had both political authority and financial leverage, because the United States gives $3 billion in mostly military aid to Israel every year — more than to any other country.

If you doubt the power of the Christian Zionist and Zionist lobbies, just look at the recent lopsided congressional vote in support of Israel’s devastating aggression against its democratic neighbor, Lebanon. You can be sure that AIPAC’s wealthy donors will punish the nine members of Congress who refused to go along.

To understand the power internationally of this American alliance, just recall how long the United States defied unanimous world opinion in the United Nations for a ceasefire in Lebanon. The U.S. threatened its veto power for 34 days to allow Israel to pulverize Lebanon’s Muslim and Christian communities.

6. So what’s the difference between the mainstream Christian interpretation of the Bible and that of Christian Zionists?

First, dispensationalists believe that all the verses in the Bible are not only literally true, but equal in significance. Second, Christian Zionists, unlike Biblical scholars, confuse Biblical prophecy with prediction. Third, televangelists display a willful ignorance of centuries of serious Christian scholarship.

As I mentioned, dispensationalism represents a uniquely American and offbeat approach to Scripture. The most convincing critics of Christian Zionism are devout Christian scholars, some of them former dispensationalists.

More important, dispensationalists — just one school of fundamentalists — assert that every word or phrase in the Bible is potentially of equal value to every other. Any verse can be cherry-picked to create a brand new End Timer narrative that violates both the letter and spirit of the original contexts.

For example, an obscure passage in Daniel or an allegorical reference in Revelation is given greater weight than the Golden Rule or Sermon on the Mount. It’s as if an inexperienced chef thumbed through a cookbook and selected a few ingredients from many recipes. The result could be a deadly concoction.

Second, televangelists and pop writers like Hal Lindsey and the authors of the Left Behind series break with centuries of Biblical scholarship when they assert that prophecies made thousands of years ago by ancient sages fell into a time warp just for modern preachers.

Today’s Christian Zionists carefully select prophecies out of context and transform them into predictions — something entirely different. They claim that these Scriptural passages mysteriously waited thousands of years for a few dozen wealthy American televangelists to manipulate in order to explain current events as part of some secret and hair-raising divine plan.

If the Bush Administration had only listened to us, then . . . Well sometimes folks listened to the Biblical prophets and sometimes they didn’t.

Most Biblical scholars consider the Bible a closed system. All prophecies were fulfilled or avoided within the Bible’s own framework. In fact Christians have traditionally used the fulfillment of prophecy and the performance of miracles as proof of divine inspiration.

Scrolls and documents underwent countless transcriptions by unknown agents and changed through translations from Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin based upon the contemporary meanings of words that reflected the social structures of the times. Even the latest New International Version of the English-language Bible underwent hundreds of changes, some significant, as a result of ongoing scholarship. Clearly the changed passages could not have literally true both before and after.

7. So what kind of people originally devised this approach to Scripture?

The fathers of dispensationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (there were no women) were mostly lonely misanthropes. Each man was convinced that he alone understood the true meaning of the Bible. Every other Christian in the world was not only wrong, but deluded by Satanic forces.

As the dispensationalist system evolved over time each new interpreter claimed to have been the first to discover the true meaning of the Bible. He rarely gave credit to those from whom he had inherited his ideas. As the Rev. Stephen Sizer notes, this was especially the case with Hal Lindsey.

Because the founders of the doctrine condemned all other Christians as apostates in league with the Devil, they were especially attracted to the doctrine of original sin. That’s the essence of “dispensationalism.”

What is a “dispensation”?

According to the Scofield system, a dispensation is one of seven periods in the Bible in which God orders the Jews to do something that the deity knows they will not do so that He will have to punish them. The seven cycles or dispensations (most in Genesis) include the banishment from the Garden of Eden, Noah’s worldwide flood, the several exiles of the Hebrew people, and the punishment of the Jews for rejecting Christ.

This negative view of both human nature and God explains why dispensationalists prefer the vengeful God of the Old Testament to the loving God of the New Testament. These fundamentalists find the “Shalt Nots” of Leviticus more appealing than the “Blesseds” of the Sermon on the Mount. They love the primitive “eye for an eye” rather than the enlightened “turning the other cheek.”

This explains why Christian Zionists are so eager to post the punitive Ten Commandments in public places. What was the last time you heard of fundamentalists agitating to post the Golden Rule?

Unfortunately for us Americans, these “Judeo-Christian” values are easily manipulated by a Republican administration whose wealthy supporters profit from war and preach fear, mistrust, and vengeance instead of Christian love, respect, and forgiveness.

The idea that all the bad things human beings are doing to the planet and each other are part of God’s plan, and that good people can escape the consequences by flying off to heaven at the last moment is very dangerous.

8. Where in the Bible do they find the Rapture, Armageddon, and support for Israel’s policies?

The Oxford Bible Encyclopedia was compiled by the most reputable Christian scholars in the world. There is no entry for “Rapture.” Lutheran scholar Barbara Rossing points out that the Rapture would require Jesus to return not once but twice. The Rapture is based on a misreading of the description of the second coming in Thessalonians and Matthew and ignorance of the meaning of the Greek word for “meet.”

In her wonderful little book, The Rapture Exposed, she describes the Book of Revelation as part of an allegorical tradition long familiar to serous Biblical scholars. Any attempt to read into Revelation any predictions, especially about 21st Century events is not only ridiculous, but violates the Bible’s last book’s optimistic message of the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, symbolized by the victorious Lamb.

There is a tragic irony that many Palestinians are Christians. Some still speak Aramaic, the native language of Jesus of Nazareth. Furthermore, the world would be a living hell if all of us demanded to own the real estate that God “granted” our ancestors four thousand years ago.

* * *

Israel’s claims hinge on an ambiguous promise Jehovah made to Abraham in Genesis. However “recovered” dispensationalist Dewey Beegle, professor of Old Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary, pointed out that the boundaries of the “promised land” shifted dramatically in the Old Testament.

The promise was conditional and the conditions were never met. The Hebrew word that is translated into English as “forever” appears elsewhere to mean a much shorter period of time. Does “descendants” include European non-Semitic Jews?

Several events in the Old Testament suggest the original promise was fulfilled. Furthermore, both Jesus and Paul replaced the notions of the “Chosen People” and the territorial “promised land” with the domain of universal Christianity.

Then Jesus will return and slaughter the Jews, and many million Gentiles, in the battle of Armageddon. Of the 12-15 million Jewish people now in the world, only 144,000 will survive. These Jews will all convert to Christianity.

Now that’s a Holocaust fantasy that would turn Adolf Hitler green with envy!

10. Don’t the Zionists in Israel and AIPAC know about Christian Zionist anti-Semitism?

Of course they do. The Christian Zionist scenario is no secret. Simply watch the televangelists or read their best sellers. The Zionist movers and shakers of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee know this crackpot scheme by heart.

The Christian Zionist — Zionist — corporate Republican agenda threatens us all. The forces behind the alliance are small but very powerful. When most Jewish Americans discover the depth of Christian Zionist anti-Semitism, they will denounce its spokesmen.

When most Christians who support George W. Bush’s policies take the time to examine the methodology of dispensationalism they will reject this pernicious theology as so many Evangelicals have already done.

Time is short. Christian Zionists in the United States and Zionists in Israel can easily produce a self-fulfilling prophecy that will destroy all of humanity and reduce God’s sweet earth to a smoking cinder.

• • •

"In a separate initiative, John Hagee, pastor of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, and a signer of the Christians for a United Jerusalem Statement, announced in February of this year that his church was giving more than $1 million to Israel. He claimed that the money would be used to help resettle Jews from the former Soviet Union in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

“‘We feel like the coming of Soviet Jews to Israel is a fulfillment of biblical prophecy,’ Hagee stated. When asked if he realized that his support of Israel’s Likud policies was at cross-purposes with U.S. government policy and possibly illegal, Hagee retorted: ‘I am a Bible scholar and a theologian and from my perspective, the law of God transcends the law of the United States government and the U.S. State Department.’”